How P.J. O’Rourke helped me understand life, one week after he died

It’s been a particularly busy time for me lately.  I don’t know if it’s an increased rate of work-related nonsense, or the pounds of mail I’m sorting through each day from friendly, helpful folks who just want to make sure I’m aware of the value of their particular Medicare supplement plan, but it feels like I’m never getting in front of things.  Not even on top of them, really; more just hoping to hold on and be dragged along.  It was already midday today, after a morning physical at the doctor’s and a trip to the office to refresh my memory of how to get there, when I got to the morning paper and found this essay by Christopher Buckley on his friend, the conservative writer, satirist and commentator P.J. O’Rourke, who passed away last week.

I recall first noticing the name P.J. O’Rourke in the masthead and bylines in National Lampoon of the mid 1970s.  Among that group of friends, we believed NatLamp in this time to be the funniest thing alive, or perhaps ever to have lived, and certainly that ever would live, and any of the persons who was writing what we were reading there was a gift from the cosmos.  Because it was always funny, and because its targets were everyone and everything, no sacred cows allowed, I assumed that all those people writing those things must surely believe in all the things I believed in.  It was at first a great surprise to me years later (the 80s or 90s) when I read something by O’Rourke and realized he had been a conservative all those years before; according to his Wikipedia entry, “Many of O’Rourke’s essays recount that during his student days he was a leftist, anti-war hippie, but that in the 1970s his political views underwent a volte-face. He emerged as a political observer and humorist rooted in libertarian conservatism.”

O’Rourke’s political philosophies weren’t in lockstep with either of the major political parties in this country.  Clearly not a Democrat, but he did not offer non-critical obeisance to the Republicans, either: as Buckley notes, O’Rourke believed Hillary Clinton was “wrong ‘about absolutely everything,’ except in one regard: She wasn’t Donald Trump.”  That’s pretty much why I voted for her in 2016, too, and have felt like I’ve been dogged by Joe Btfsplk’s cloud ever since when it comes to questions of politics and government.

Buckley says “P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a particular and an essential sensibility. He found humor everywhere and in everything, especially in his fellow Republicans,” and he makes a good case for today’s Republicans having no sense of humor at all.  I agree: how could anyone who takes Donald Trump seriously see the humor in anything else?  But it was this line from Buckley that really caught me: “The Trump era could have been one great big enormous sandbox for P.J. to play in. Instead, he found it dispiriting, a pageant of stupidity, boorishness and coarseness.”

Dispiriting.  A pageant of stupidity, boorishness and coarseness.  Gawd, how on the nose.  Thank you, P.J. O’Rourke, for inspiring your friend Christopher Buckley to put into words the feelings I’ve been fighting for years now.